Anno 1404: Gold Edition

Exactly what I remember from the good old days. Mechanics still hold up very well with some obvious outdated issues. Still good enough to spend the next few weeks grinding through campaign and scenario missions. for 14.99 this is a great purchase. If this is on sale this should definitely be a must-have in your book.

Its a good game but it suffers from an awful memory leak that takes some of the enjoyment out of the game. You are forced to continually save and close the game so it doesn't crash. Thankfully the game will warn you (or should) when its going to run out of memory, but its still frustrating. That aside, the game is good fun. Its nice to play a semi-peaceful game about economically dominating your rivals rather than defeating them in battle. The graphics are good, it runs reasonably well (when its not crashing) and is complex, but accessible, enough to be deep and fun. While the online servers may have been taken down, it is possible to use services such as GameRanger to run sudo LAN games over the internet. My girlfriend and I are enjoying it. My top tip: Get it on sale. At the end of the day, its a game from 2010 by BlueByte (Settlers, another one of my faves)

But for this one... I'll review instead how I feel about this game. I LOVE this game! I cherish and celebrate it with every ounce I can muster. This, for me, is the cherry on top! I rejoice in thankfulness and gratefulness for the ones responsible for bringing this gem to fruition. Sincerely, thank you whoever you(s) are.

Do you care for RTS games? Want to just relax and do some city/resource/trading management with some farming, and maybe fight some pirates if you want to? Game also has a storyline, but if you dont want to touch that, theres a feature for that. Don't care for online games? This games got your name on it then. I had not even Campaigns and Scenarios yet and was already hours in. This was a classic, and as you've probably already read, the "gold standard" of the Anno series.

The Anno series' cumbersome DRM left a very sour taste in my mouth for this entire series. Now that it's on GOG, I thought I'd give it a shot since it was always the DRM, not the game itself, that kept me away. I've been playing through the quick start missions and thoroughly enjoying myself. I love city builders and even though I'm not typically fond of games set in this era I would highly recommend this one. It lives up to the hype. The buildings and cities have tons of character and the building system seems pretty intuitive.